


A Christmas Story

by House_of_Ares



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Feelstide 2012, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:51:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/House_of_Ares/pseuds/House_of_Ares
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Phil is Jewish.</p>
<p>Just what it says on the box.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Christmas Story

  
  
“So... are you going home to see your parents for Christmas?”  
“No,” Coulson said simply, and rolled over, tugging a pillow closer to his shoulder. Clint was tempted to spoon up and press the issue a little, but he knew better. Instead, he stretched, let the back of one hand fall against warm bare back, and closed his eyes.  
  
Phil had always been a little twitchy about his family.  
  
  
  
He brings it up the next day as they're getting ready for work, Coulson half-dressed and leaning on the counter and waiting for the English muffin to toast. He's perched on the breakfast bar with a bowl of Special K. The berries are delicious, but the texture's a little disgusting.  
“You don't talk about your family much.”  
“No.”  
He takes another bite and bonks the cabinet door with a heel.  
“I thought everybody went home for Christmas. Family and friends and all that.”  
“My family doesn't celebrate Christmas.”  
Clint frowns at that.  
“No Christmas? Everybody does Christmas. Hell, I'm not Christian, and I do Christmas. What, are you a Jew? Jewish?”  
Phil looks over just as the muffin pops up.  
“Yeah. Jew-ish.”  
Clint frowns, a spoonful of cereal paused halfway to his mouth.  
“Seriously?”  
“I live in Crown Heights, Clint.”  
“Well, yeah, but you said because it was safe.”  
“It _is_ safe.” He takes the muffin from the toaster and spreads butter on it. Clint takes a thoughtful bite of cereal.  
“How come I never knew that?”  
“It really never came up.” He shrugs. “I'm not religious or anything.”  
“Yeah, but … seriously?”  
“Yes, seriously.”  
“Huh.” He drinks the milk from his cereal bowl and puts it down. “Where do your parents live, anyway? Here?”  
“No, they moved to Florida twenty years ago. While I was in the Army.”  
Clint's baffled; he's known Phil for eight years, been dating for almost a year. How did this never come up?  
“So...what, they didn't like that you enlisted?”  
Phil puts the knife in the dishwasher and takes a bite of his muffin, staring out the window. When he swallows, he doesn't even look at Clint.  
“No. They didn't. At all.”  
“Did they disown you or something?”  
“It's getting late. We need to get a move on.” He leaves half the muffin on the counter and disappears into the bathroom, probably to shave.  
Clint slides off the counter and rinses his bowl, puts it in the dishwasher the way Coulson prefers. How the hell did he not know Phil was Jewish? And what does that even mean, anyway?  
The neighborhood's almost entirely Jewish, but he's never seen Phil wearing the big black suit coats most of the men wear. He's never seen Phil in a yarmulke, or even seen one in the house.  
Occasionally, when they're outside together, he's heard Phil talk to them in English or what sounds like mangled German, but he'd assumed that was Phil just keeping in practice with his foreign languages. There certainly weren't extended conversations, just polite greetings and a moment of small talk, the kind all the neighbors did.  
Honestly, the only Jew Clint's ever known was a boy in his third-grade class, and he'd pitied the kid; Clint was dirt-poor, but even he had a GI Joe to show-and-tell when they got back from Christmas break. Simon had a plastic top, which he said had candy in it when he got it. That was it, and Simon didn't seem like his family was poor. His clothes fit, and they were nice, at least before he got beaten up on the playground.  
The kids in Phil's neighborhood seem mostly shy, although the downstairs neighbor kids sometimes bring bread or soup up; one said he wanted to join the Army when he grew up and Phil just smiled at him.  
Clint pulls on socks and his black BDU pants, then a black T-shirt, considering. Did Phil get beaten up on the playground? It would explain a lot. But family – that's disconcerting. Phil has mentioned a sister, and Clint's under the impression that both his parents are alive. But Phil – Phil should have a good family. Not like his own jacked-up childhood.  
He grabs a hoodie and goes to the living room to put his boots on. Coulson's out, shaved and with his pale-blue shirt on, an indigo tie with silver stripes. The jacket's hanging over the back of a dining chair and Clint looks up from the couch, watches him grab the other cold half of the muffin and top off his coffee.  
“They disowned you because you... quit being Jewish?”  
Phil looks over and sighs.  
“No, they didn't disown me. It's just tense, that's all.”  
“But don't you want to go spend Hanukkah with them or something? I mean, I know you haven't taken leave, like really gone, in like a year,” he says. “That's – if I had a decent family, I'd -”  
“Enough, Clint,” Phil says, and the tone is the flat no-bullshit one he hardly ever uses with Clint.  
He shuts his mouth, slides into the hoodie, and goes downstairs to wait by the car.  
  
  
It's a little tense until they're in the Holland Tunnel, and the radio DJ makes a wiseass remark that makes Clint chuckle. Just like that, the tension breaks, and it's normal again, Clint riffing on the jock's commentary and Phil grinning. He puts the earlier conversation out of his mind; Phil doesn't want to talk about it, and he can respect that.  
One of these days, he'll get Phil drunk and then get the story out of him.  
  
  
He goes home with Phil again that night; it started out an occasional thing but he's been spending less and less time at his own place. It's a shithole anyway, and slowly his things have been migrating, just for convenience; two bows behind Phil's bedroom door, a full quiver on the closet shelf. A toothbrush and the Edge shaving gel he likes but Phil says is the olfactory equivalent of a full frontal assault and not in the good way. At least half his clothes – Phil has a washer and dryer, and the washers in Clint's building are perpetually broken, so laundry has a tendency to make a pilgrimage to Phil's and never return.  
Phil's quiet in the car on the way back; Clint calls for Chinese before they're out of Manhattan and they've just gotten in the door and ditched shoes and jackets when the doorbell rings. Clint pays and drops the bags on the breakfast bar; Phil emerges from the bedroom changed into sweats and a T-shirt, grabs the food and puts it at the table and sits.  
Clint's about to take his own to the couch, but Phil says “sit” as he's pulling out chopsticks, so he sits.  
“Look, I don't like talking about this, but you deserve to know,” he says. It sounds a little stilted, and suddenly Clint feels like a shitbag for prying this morning. He's not exactly a fountain of conversation about his own folks.  
“You don't have to. I get it.”  
“No, I want to tell you. But ...just this once, okay?”  
Clint nods and chopsticks a bite of Mongolian beef.  
“I grew up in Monsey. My dad was – is – a securities guy. Stocks and stuff. Mom was a mom. I went to a Jewish school and after my bar mitzvah, I'd go every morning with my dad to synagogue before school for shacharis. Morning prayers.”  
Clint frowns a little; that sounds like torture, going to church every morning. But it's pretty clear that Phil wants to get this over with, so he gives a little grunt of acknowledgment and takes another bite.  
“I went to a yeshiva, and we did secular education in the mornings and Jewish stuff in the afternoons. Hebrew, Bible, Talmud, all of it.”  
“Like, same flavor of Jew as the people here?”  
“No, these are Hasidim. We were modern Orthodox.”  
Clint must have a blank look on his face, because Coulson actually grins.  
“Looks pretty much the same. Big differences though. I'll explain it some other time if you actually care.”  
Clint nods again, and Phil picks at the garlic chicken with his chopsticks but doesn't eat.  
“Anyway. I was supposed to graduate and maybe go to YU and find a nice girl and get married, and continue my Jewish education and work in my dad's office. When I came home and told them I'd joined the Army...they weren't happy.”  
“I bet not,” Clint says, and finally Phil puts a piece of chicken in his mouth and chews carefully.  
“I was stupid. I was eighteen and heartily sick of life as I knew it. I told dad I was joining the Army and going to go join the rest of reality instead of pretending we were in 1800s Poland. He said I was throwing my life away. And I said -” Phil draws a deep breath and sighs it out. “I said I'd rather die than live the way he did.” He stares at the bare tabletop and taps the butt of his chopsticks on it.  
The pause is so loaded that Clint puts his chopsticks in the top of the styrofoam box. Grease slicks across the beads of condensation.  
“Sorry,” he says, because there's nothing else to say.  
“I packed up some things, random things, and put them in my backpack and left. I didn't see my parents for like two years. Took some leave and surprised them at home on a Saturday when I knew they'd be around. I apologized, but it's never been the same.”  
“Holy shit.”  
Phil sighs again.  
“Anyway. My mom kept trying to set me up on dates. If I was stateside, she'd get in touch with a rabbi in the area, ask about a matchmaker, and I'd get these random calls from women who knew 'a lovely girl' and tell me about the local synagogue and people would invite me to Shabbos dinner and … finally I asked for an assignment to Korea and then to Germany. Where I could hide. Took every deployment they offered and volunteered for a couple more.”  
Clint knows all about running and hiding, but thinking about Phil going through it makes his heart hurt. Maybe after what he'd been through he ended up thinking other families were better, and it's disillusioning to think that they aren't.  
“I finally came out to them right before I retired. Thirty-seven and still hiding shit from my parents.” He shrugs. “I still talk to them, sometimes, I guess they've kind of come to terms with me, but when I visit it's for a couple of hours here and there. That's all.”  
“So... you're not really a Jew anymore?”  
Phil shrugs and smiles slightly.  
“It's a blood thing, Clint. You can't just quit. I just... don't really do it anymore. I still feel weird about eating meat in restaurants though. I grew up eating only kosher, it still makes me kind of uncomfortable.”  
The light flicks on in Clint's head.  
“So you eat junk food donuts instead.”  
Phil snorts.  
“Yeah. And takeout from kosher places. And live in a Jewish neighborhood.”  
“I see.”  
There's a long slow intake of breath, and Phil stares at his chicken.  
“And now my dinner's cold.”  
Clint huffs a laugh and gets up, grabs the box and takes it to the microwave.  
Phil gets up and follows, leans back with his hands braced on the counter.  
“So that's why I don't talk about my family much.”  
There's pain on his face, the kind that's old and familiar and turned from sting into a dull ache; Clint stares at him, watching for a long moment.  
“Will you show me how you do the Hanukkah candle thing? If I buy you one?”  
“A menorah?” Phil grins, and then it softens into something mellower. “Yeah. That might be nice.”  
  
  
  
Wednesday, everyone in the tower's buzzing about Christmas. Tony's drunkenly vowing new cars for everyone since they're all going to be moving in once the repairs are finished, and Steve is trying to talk him into a white-elephant gift exchange.  
Natasha looks over to Coulson.  
“Sir, tell him we're not doing presents.”  
“Zip it, Stark,” Phil says, and Tony turns on him with puppy-dog eyes.  
“Come on, Agent, you know you want a car for Christmas!”  
Clint drops an arm around Phil's shoulder before he can respond.  
“We don't do Christmas,” he says archly. “Phil's Jewish.”  
  



End file.
